[Jodavaho.io]

I’ve been journalling for 10+ years. In addition to forcing me to actually write down what happened that day, reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. I can review my now-wife’s rocky courtship and feel grateful we made it. I looked back 3 years ago and found the day our children were conceived :D (we have twins). I can review the anxieties of my PhD years, etc etc.

For some reason, feeling like my past life has not been short helps me to feel that there’s so much life left to live. Looking back at the phenomenal changes of the last 5 years (or 10), shows me that I can do a lot with the next 5 years.

Novelty and so on may help to “slow” time, but for me the perception of the shortness of life is best fought by reminding yourself that it is not short, and there is so much change coming - more than you could imagine.

(and I’m horrible at doing it every day, maybe every week or so during slumps)

We’re at our computers all day every day. So I just lowered the barrier to entry with a few bash tricks. It’s helped me keep the habit up.

https://jodavaho.io/tags/bullet-journal.html

Now, I review 1, 5, and 10 years ago every day, to re-live my life from those years, so to speak:

# list dates from 10 years ago +/3 3 days
# get years and day range from args
echo "### $years years ago"
for i in `seq -w -$days $days`
do
  olddate=`date -d "$years years ago $i days" +%Y-%m-%d`  
  longdate=`date -d "$years years ago $i days" +%A\ %B\ %d,\ %Y`
  echo "### $olddate.md ($longdate)"
  cat $olddate.md
done